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Want to see something really funny on YouTube? I’m not talking mild chuckle funny, I’m talking about side-splitting, laugh until you cry funny? While videos of screaminggoats are always good for a belly laugh, but if you want to guffaw, check out your own videos. Yup. The ones starring you. The ones where you provide detailed instruction or the ones where you are discussing some heavy topic in great detail. Those videos. Yeah. They’re a riot. To see the “funny” version of your video, play the video with the closed captioning turned on. Unless you’ve done the work to correct the closed captioning, you will be amused by YouTube’s automated closed captions and how YouTube thinks it knows what you’re saying.

They can be terribly funny…. to everyone except the hearing impaired. To those of us who are deaf, partially deaf, or have less-than-perfect hearing, YouTube can be one of the most frustrating places on the web to visit. (Full disclosure…. I’m deaf in one ear and have a cochlear implant which helps me to a certain degree, but in order to fully understand what’s being said in many videos, I have to turn on closed captioning.)

Two simple steps can be taken to ensure that your message is communicated clearly to those who have hearing impairments.

First, if the video is a screen-capture that contains instructions on how to complete a certain task, include text in the video itself. I use Camtasia, which includes a plethora of “call-outs” and other ways to add text to videos, but the option to add text to the video is available with most video editors.

Second, if something is important enough to distribute (via Twitter or in a blog post), then take the time to edit the closed captions. YouTube’s machine captioning provides a reasonable starting point, but it misses a lot of the nuance. Punctuation is practically non-existent in YouTube’s auto-generated captions, and if you have a particularly long video, it may take extra time to get it just exactly perfect. But it’s worth it!

Sure, I realize that you may not have time to go perfect every little detail, but if the message so important enough that you created a video, shouldn’t it be equally important to reach all people?

So that’s my rant for now…. Perhaps my next task is to create a video showing how to edit captions on YouTube videos.

As always, questions, comments, concerns, or (gentle) criticisms are welcome.

This post is really for my own purposes, so that I know exactly where these instructions can be found, but they’re incredibly helpful if you ever find yourself in the position of needing to convert a recording of a GoToMeeting session into a format that you can actually use.

Long story short, GoToWhatever uses a proprietary codec to create the .WMV versions of recordings. So, even though it’s in a .WMV format, it’s not actually a real true-to-life .WMV file and in order to re-encode the video into a .MP4 format (which is what I need), it is necessary to strip out the GoToWhatever codec first…

GlennDCitrix has created a wonderful step-by-step tutorial on exactly how to do this, so I’m just posting the link on my own blog so if I forget where I put it, I can always find it.

I searched my desk and dug through files hoping to find the perfect idea for my first “real” blog post. There’s so much I want to write about and it’s really difficult deciding where to start. Sometimes the best way to move forward is to take a step back, so I’ve decided to revisit a session I presented during the Fall 2011 pre-class week called “YouTube in YourClass” which focused on ways to best use YouTube in the classroom (traditional and online). The workshop covered establishing an account, creating a channel, configuring playlists, and uploading original content, but the topic that generated the most interest was how to get past the cat videos and find material appropriate to your class. So, without further adieu, I present to you some of my preferred techniques for finding a needle in the digital haystack known as YouTube…

Check out YouTube EDU. YouTube EDU is a repository of lectures, educational videos, and even entire courses from colleges and universities around the country and the world including (but not even remotely limited to) Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Cambridge, UCLA, Harvard, Yale, and more. If you’re looking for a “guest lecturer” to shed light on a particular topic, this might be a great place to look! The best part is that all the videos in YouTube EDU are submitted and maintained by the educational institutions, so you won’t have to wade through scads of unrelated videos to find something that will work in your class.

Subscribe to channels! If there’s a resource that you know consistently puts out great material, why not subscribe to their channel? Lots of organizations and individuals maintain some spectacular channels that are constantly updated with high quality videos. Some of my personal favorites include TED, edutopia, and the Library of Congress, but don’t let my tastes influence you.

Search Smarter. This is really the big one. YouTube relies entirely on its users to assign appropriate titles, keywords and categories to the materials they upload, but sometimes this information isn’t exactly descriptive and can sometimes be downright deceptive! Although these tips won’t help you find materials that aren’t properly titled, indexed, and categorized, they will help you weed out some of the unwanted results.

Use quotation marks to search for exact phrases:Searching for “Like a Rolling Stone” will return videos which contain those four words in that order. So, instead of having every Rolling Stones video and every cover of Muddy Waters’ “Rolling Stone”, you’ll only get videos which have “Like a Rolling Stone” listed in their title or description.

Use + or – to require or prohibit words in the results:The + operator tells YouTube that the word MUST be included in the results while the – operator tells YouTube that the term CAN NOT be in the results. Let’s say I want to look for Bob Dylan videos, but I don’t want to see any videos relating to Dylan Thomas in my results. A search wherein ALL results contain the word “Bob” but none of the results contain the word “Thomas” would look something like this…Dylan +Bob -Thomas

Use intitle: to search through video titles only:Here’s a lesser-known trick that can yield some great results. By default, YouTube searches for matches in both the title and keyword fields. To eliminate searches through keywords, and to only retrieve videos which contain your search string in the title, simply put intitle: at the start of your search. So, to search only for videos with “Like a Rolling Stone” in the title, I’d do the following search…intitle:Like a Rolling Stone<<<<< ——— NOTE: There is NO SPACE between the colon following intitle and the search string.

COMBINE 1, 2, and 3 as needed:Now it gets really cool! You can combine these search techniques and get even better results. If I want to get videos of Bob Dylan singing “Like a Rolling Stone” but don’t want to
get any cover versions of the song, I could use the following search…intitle:+Dylan “Like a Rolling Stone” -cover

Give these techniques a shot the next time you’re digging through YouTube for a video clip to use in your course.

As always, any comments, questions, concerns or (gentle) criticisms are welcome.